The Aerie
Ach, so what to post here? "Oh gosh golly I'm so darned busy" once again? Madness is described as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result: so, the weekend. I've got more "to do's" that I could accomplish in a week, and I've got two days in which to get them done. Along with that, I need to relax, recreate, reconnect, and maybe do some writing.
Fat chance.
I've got work to finish up from my contract client - their billing system crashed as I was filing my month-end hours yesterday, so I need to get my hours filed in the next few minutes.
I've got household chores to do, including washing clothes.
I have to clean my office, so I can find anything.
I have to do monthly billing for my company.
I have to plan for some stuff next week, including an oil change and a possible day trip.
And tomorrow is of course consumed with going to church, watching the May Day parade, etc.
And I have clients that I have to call, taxes to pay, proposals to write.
I dunno, it's always the same every weekend - too much to do, and no time to do it. I wish I could get to one of those days where I can just sit back and do nothing. Not sure what it would take to do that though. But I gotta change something, because this is just stupid, weekends that feel like workdays, workdays that feel like slavery.
My one indulgence is that I just figured out how to store my CDs onto my file server, so that I can play them anywhere in the house. So while I'm doing everything else, I'm cycling CDs through my fileserver at about ten minutes apiece, and adding them to my music collection.
That's fun at least!
I was doing pretty well right up until now. I was trying to keep away from the snacks but after 10 hours at work I was starting to jones for the sugarcarbs. So I bought a bag of "Grandma's Mini Cookie Bites," under the premise that I could eat only a portion of the bag and limit the damage to my system.
Then I made the mistake of reading the nutritional information.
Now, everyone knows about the trick of labelling a snack food with a deceptive little "serving size" label that pretends that the snack isn't as bad as you think. Well, I thought I could trust Grandma, but apparently the boys at Frito-Lay have sent her a note made of glued-on magazine letters that read "rE1aBeL thE 5naCk OR MuFfY gEts iT." Because Grandma's label says "Serving Size - 9 Cookies, Servings Per Container About 4"
Oookay, so everything in the bag is actually four times worse than the label would lead one to believe. I've linked to the label for Grandma's Vanilla cookies above, since the Chocolage & Peanut Butter bites are mysteriously absent from the website. Then I did a little math.
Rather than 36 cookies, my bag contained 32. That's over 10% less than advertised, but in this case that's probably just as well. Still, I wish I could bill my clients for 36 hours when I only worked 32. Based on those numbers, if you are careless and accidentally eat the entire bag in one sitting, you consume...
Calories: 535
Total Fat: 25g
Sat Fat: 5g
Sodium: 500mg
Carbs: 75g
Sugar: 43g
Comparing this to McDonald's (because it's handy) that's about as many calories and fat as a a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, as much salt as an entire salt packet, and as much sugar as a caramel sundae. That's a good portion of a meal at McDonald's (not that I eat there), all in what was supposed to be a tiny little snack...
By the time I was done counting, calculating, and Googling this nutrition info, I wasn't hungry anymore, and it was time to go home.
Probably just as well...
All I wanted to do was shave. That's all. A little lather, a little razor, a little blood, a little alcohol, a little screaming, and in five minutes, I figured, I would be finished.
Of course it didn't turn out that way... or why would I be blogging it?
All the steps through screaming went swimmingly. I trimmed my beard so that the needle swung back from "Grizzly Adams" and quivvered just shy of "Dapper." I was applying little bits of toilet paper to stanch the blood that threatened to stain my shirt when I looked down. The sink looked like Straits of Florida a week before Spring Training, with thousands of little beard trimmings fleeing the tyranny of the faucet for the opportunity represented by that nameless hole in the front of the sink that keeps the drain from bubbling.
Their voyage was smooth and calm, because the sink was not draining.
Now, I could have left it. I could have done like everyone else in my family and pretended not to notice that the sink wasn't draining. By the time I got back from work, the sink would either have drained or evaporated, right?
But noooooo....
Two hours later I emerged from beneath the sink, frustrated. I couldn't find my plumbing snake, and after extracting the usual mess from the elbow joint and the drain rocker, the water still wasn't going down the pipe.
I had found my wife's Grandfather's old plumbing snake -- a treasured heirloom in the form of a thick ribbon of metal suitable for binding one of King Kong's ankles -- and tried it to no avail. I found an increasingly-rare wire coathanger, but it couldn't make its way far enough up the pipe: clearly the clog was at the very end of the horizontal drain pipe, right where the water plunges into the vertical shaft that also serves the kitchen sink on the other side of the wall. I tried the shopvac on both "suck" and "blow" settings and I was so frustrated by that time that neither joke occurred to me. Finally I ran the hose in from outside, jammed it in the pipe, and turned it on.
Nothing. All the water reversed course and drained back into the bucket. The clog in that tunnel is as smelly and hard to dislodge as Tom DeLay.
Having sacrificed a morning's work, all I had to show for my efforts was a filthy bathroom floor, gunk stains on my shirt, and the acquired, persistent smell of that gunk soaked right into my fingers.
So I put the piping back together, I removed my equipment, I put away my tools, and washed the gunk off my hands, scrubbing twice to get rid of the smell. When I was finished, the water remained in the sink.
I pretended that I didn't notice it.
I've often pestered the readers of my church mailing list that we should be more socially active than we already are. As Unitarians, I believe we have a duty to promote reason and tolerance in an increasingly intolerant and unreasonable world.
It seems, however, that I'm just a rookie at this. Columnist Jon Carroll reports on the Unitarian Jihad, which is even now planning to dump gallons of Ritalin and Valium into the Potomak upstream of the Beltway.
Having learned of its existence, it took me very little time to locate its contact points on the Web. As part of the indoctrination process, UJ members are granted a New Name. With this new name we dispose of our old, extremist, unreasonable selves, and give our lives over to the radical philosophies of Reasoned Discussion, Calmness, and Pragmatic Solutions.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Pepper Spray of Quiet Reflection. This seems a very appropriate name, for only the Pepper Spray of Quiet Reflection can get some people to close their eyes and calm down for a while. I would especially like bestow the Pepper Spray of Quiet Reflection upon Minnesota Senator Michelle Bachmann, who has been using her eyes for foolish and undignified things.
Recently a blogger (available at the link) caught MN Senator Michelle Bachmann - sponsor of the amendment to engrave homophobia into the state constitution - crouching behind some bushes at the State Capitol while trying to spy on a gay rights rally in opposition to her amendment. Further images are visible at the bottom of the blog entry linked where it is clear that this figure is indeed Senator and aspiring US Congressperson Michelle Bachmann.
The Unitarian Jihad will be there next time, to provide Ms. Bachmann with a soothing cup of chamomile tea, a deck chair and an umbrella, so that she could relax while watching the rally (which is after all a public event upon which one need not spy). By assaulting her anxiety and quashing her fear, we of the Unitarian Jihad believe that even Ms. Bachmann would eventually succumb to the powers of Reason...
And now it's vacation time. After working at my current client site for a full year (wow!) I decided I needed to take a full week off of work - even if I can't really afford it.
Okay, I -can- afford it, I've spent the last year digging out of debt, but still, it's hard to give up a week's pay in order to sit around and do nothing. On the other hand, I don't know how to do nothing, so maybe it's about time I practiced.
Fourteen years ago, April of 1991, I started a job at the University of Minnesota. The desk that I was given had not been cleaned - the last owner had taken most of their personal belongings, but left a lot of papers and boxes and just plain crap under and around the desk. Actually it was pretty disgusting. I found a can of that horrid lemon-foam desk cleaner and scrubbed sticky who-knows-what off the bulky brown wood, further chipping away the finish.
Discarding some cobwebby cardboard boxes and crumpled paper bags, I came across a coffee maker and coffee mug.
The coffeemaker was a squared C-shaped device, and the cup and cone wedged into it. The coffeemaker, mug, and filter cone all fit together snugly.
The cup had clearly belonged to another programmer like myself, because it said "Don't Mess with my Software" in funky dot-matrix characters, on a design resembling the green-barred paper commonly found in dot-matrix printers.
When I finished cleaning my desk I took the coffeemaker and mug into the washroom and cleaned them thoroughly. The coffeemaker looked like it was about to fall apart at any time, and the burner was scored with rust and cooked coffee.
I had a coffee cup of my own, and I felt a little weird about using some stranger's cup, so I tried swapping cups and discovered something interesting: the coffeemaker only worked with the cup that came with it. My cup was too large, and it wouldn't fit with the filter. Another cup I tried later was too small, causing the hot water sputtering from the coffeemaker to splatter all around its base.
Only the cup that came with the coffeemaker worked correctly - fitting the plastic cone just tightly enough that no hot water spattered.
So I used the mug and the coffeemaker, and soon came to like it. As the years passed, my dot-matrix mug became more and more quaint, and finally nostalgic. My kids have no idea what the design is supposed to mean, while computer geeks my own age were reminded of the bygone days when a 1200 baud printer was the Latest Thing. Only a few accountants, printing checks on special carbon paper printers, still have dot-matrix green-bar paper anymore.
The other day I was pouring tea for my kids at snack time. I'm a lucky dad whose kids - American kids, that is - like tea. It's cheap, it's good for you, and it doesn't even have sugar - although they often take steps to rememdy that situation.
So I poured tea for the kids, and then grabbed my "Don't Mess with My Software" mug. I usually left it downstairs in my office with my coffeemaker, but I'd just pulled it out of the dishwasher.
I put in the teabag, poured the water, and picked up the cup.
There was a click that I felt in my fingers, and the sound of water spattering the floor. My "Don't Mess with My Software" cup had cracked, pouring tea all over the floor. The solid ceramic mug had failed to outlast the dilapidated coffeemaker that I had found with it.
After taking a final snapshot, I sadly disposed of my good old coffeemug. Then I set about finding its replacement.
Now, we're not short of mugs around here. Everytime I see one of those late-night charity commercials asking if you could give just fifteen cents so that a child in a third world country could have a ceramic novelty mug, I feel terribly guilty. So I figured I'd find one or two that might fit snugly into the coffeemaker.
I went through every mug on the shelf, every mug hanging from the hooks, and every mug tucked away in the back of the cabinets. Nothing. Every mug was either too large or too small. Finally, on a back hook, I found one mug that fit. So the good news is that I found a new mug to replace my cool "Don't Mess with My Software" mug. The bad news is that it's, well... it's rather less cool than my old one...